The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE) plans to open a call center with a specialized unit to locate unaccompanied migrant children. The idea is for local and state authorities to collaborate by informing the immigration agency of the whereabouts of these undocumented immigrants and thus facilitating their detention and subsequent deportation.
The measure is part of the Donald Trump administration’s campaign against migrants, which has not left minors aside. In addition to identifying those who are still under 18, the target would also be those who arrived in the country illegally as minors, but are now adults.
The center would provide information to federal authorities, according to the document, posted Tuesday on a government procurement website and reported by Reuters. ICE aims to create a 24-hour operations center capable of handling between 6,000 and 7,000 immigration enforcement-related calls daily.
The contract document indicates that the center will be located in Nashville, Tennessee, although the reason for choosing that city is not explained. CoreCivic, one of the two largest private prison companies operating ICE detention centers, is based in Nashville.
In fiscal year 2024, approximately 98,000 children crossed the U.S. border alone, fleeing the conditions of poverty, violence or abuse they face in their home countries. The government criticized the previous administration for losing track of thousands of minors placed with their sponsors in the United States, risking them falling into human trafficking rings. Children’s advocates are suspicious of attempts to find out their whereabouts. “It doesn’t seem to me that ICE should know where those children are, because it’s clear that what ICE is doing all over the country has nothing to do with helping people, much less unaccompanied children,” says Scott Bassett, an attorney for the Amica organization.
Unaccompanied minors have been the target of Trump’s anti-immigration crusade since the beginning of his term. Various initiatives have been aimed at facilitating their expulsion. Shortly after taking office, the tycoon attempted to shut down federal legal services for unaccompanied minors, cutting funding to organizations that provide them with representation and accompany them through the asylum-seeking process.
Although a federal court temporarily blocked this suspension while the case was resolved, the attempt to undermine child protection is of serious concern. “Legal representation can make the difference between safety and danger. Children who benefit from legal representation obtain compensation in 73% of cases, compared to only 15% without lawyers,” according to the International Rescue Committee (IRC).
Trump is unhappy with the pace of deportations, which are not on track to reach the one million goal in his first year, so any strategy to increase the number is being explored. That now means looking for those children, or those who came to the United States as children, even if it means skipping the necessary legal procedures.
$2,500 for self-deportation
Last month it became known that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) would offer $2,500 to unaccompanied minors over the age of 14 who are in custody for self-deportation. Critics, who have dubbed the plan Operation Freaky Friday, have denounced the coercion that minors would suffer. “If they really wanted to help, the best way to do it is to give them lawyers to protect their rights in court,” Bassett says. A few days ago he went to one of the reception centers where children are held in custody by the authorities to explain the proposal, which involves renouncing their right to seek asylum in the future.
The DHS has defended the initiative as an incentive for children to return to their families, but organizations that defend minors report that in many cases they are fleeing the abuse they suffer in their homes.
The same justification was used by DHS in August to put 76 Guatemalan children who arrived alone in the United States on a plane in the middle of the night with the goal of returning them to the country they fled. A judge prevented the transfer. The magistrate did not consider that this was family reunification, as the government lawyers claimed, because the families had not requested it and the children did not want to return to their countries. The administration planned to deport more than 300 children to Guatemala.
The changes made to immigration policy for minors since Trump returned to the White House have completely transformed the treatment migrant children receive. “It’s a different world now,” Bassett says. His organization visits shelters almost every two weeks to explain all the changes. During his last visit, a girl asked him, “Why do they keep doing this to us? What did we do wrong?”
